Brian Johnson delivers brief coaching advice on creating more positive personal connections. He instructs listeners to start by acknowledging love and appreciation, shift attention away from annoyances toward past successes, explore alternative ways to connect, clarify the goal (e.g., a steadier connection with a parent), and use strategic, moment-to-moment planning to make incremental improvements.
You truly love her and you appreciate her. And let's start there. Anytime you find yourself focusing on the things that annoy you, we want to replace the negativity with positivity. Your desire to connect is a really powerful thing. What successes have we had in the past? There's a truth to old patterns that are neurologically based. Now, if there are ways for you to connect outside of that specific environment, let's find them. And then bringing it back to what we talk about all the time, well, what do you want? What you want is a more consistent, however imperfect, connection with your mom, in which the balance is tipped from annoyance to connection. And then let's do the planning. If you don't have a pathway to create the life you want and you feel hopeless and you're going to feel resentment when you're in that relationship because you can't see how you're going to improve it, it's time to do the hard, strategic work, using each moment as an opportunity to get a little bit closer to that target.
